Recruiting agents, or "programs" costly screen "applicants" in matching processes, and congestion in a market increases with the number of applicants to be screened. To combat this externality that applicants impose on programs, application costs can be used as a Pigouvian tax. Higher costs...

The world's poorest people lack capital and skills and toil for others in occupations that others shun. Using a large-scale and long-term randomized control trial in Bangladesh this paper demonstrates that sizable transfers of assets and skills enable the poorest women to shift out of...

This paper uses basic empirical facts from attention and perception psychology for a behavioral approach to equilibrium analysis at the industry and the macroeconomic level. The paper endogenously determines whether an economy is information-rich and whether scarcity of attention complements...

Using a four-round panel data set from the first phase of the Challenging the Frontiers of Poverty Reduction – Targeting the Ultra Poor (CFPR – TUP) programme of BRAC, we investigate whether a one-off transfer of livestock assets improves well-being of the very poor women in Bangladesh....

We model an environment in which individuals prefer to be in a space in which their rank is higher, be it a social space, a geographical space, a work environment, or any other comparison sphere which we refer to in this paper, and without loss of generality, as a region. When the individuals...

Current literature on the impact assessment of government innovation subsidies is mainly empirical driven and lacks an overarching theoretical model to explain the conditions under which government subsidies create positive additionalities on private R&D investment. In this paper, we present a...

Was the increase in income inequality in the US due to permanent shocks or merely to anincrease in the variance of transitory shocks? The implications for consumption and welfaredepend crucially on the answer to this question. We use CEX repeated cross-section data onconsumption and income to...

We develop a new approach to the decomposition of income risk within a nonstationary model of intertemporal choice. The approach allows for changes in income risk over the life-cycle and with the business cycle. It requires only repeated cross-section data and can allow for mixtures of...

We use data from the Survey of Consumer Finance and Survey of Income Program Participation to show that young households with children are under-insured against the risk that an adult member of the household dies. We develop a tractable macroeconomic model with human capital risk, age-dependent...